Monday, 30 June 2008

The Pentagon said Monday it is charging a Saudi Arabian with "organizing and directing" the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole — and will seek the death penalty.

Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, legal adviser to the U.S. military tribunal system, said charges are being sworn against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi of Yemeni descent, who has been held at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2006.

The charges still must be approved by a Defense Department official who oversees military tribunals set up for terrorism suspects. If they are approved, al-Nashiri he will be the first person charged in the United States in connection with the attack nearly eight years ago.

Hartmann said the allegations include conspiracy to violate laws of war, murder, treachery, terrorism, destruction of property and intentionally causing serious bodily injury.

Let’s not forget illegal parking.

Even the lefties can’t forgive this:

Al-Nashiri is also accused of a role in the Oct. 6, 2002, suicide attack on the Limburg, a French oil tanker, Hartmann said. The attack killed a Bulgarian crew member and spilled 90,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Aden.

Sadly, a picture of an oil-coated duck carries more weight with some folks than 17 flag-draped coffins.

Wesley Clark, never able to parlay four stars into even four percent in the Dem primary field, has issues with a mere US Navy squadron commander becoming Commander-in-Chief:

After decades in the news business, Bob Schieffer may have thought he’d heard it all — until yesterday on Face the Nation, when he interviewed Wesley Clark. Clark came as a surrogate for the Barack Obama campaign and attacked John McCain’s military service, saying that he was "untested and untried". After Schieffer pointed out that McCain commanded the largest naval air squadron, had honorably endured over five years of torture as a POW in Vietnam, and had been on the Senate Armed Services committee since Obama was in college, Schieffer asked how Clark could claim that McCain was "untested and untried". Clark stunned him with this answer:

Because in the matters of national security policy making, it’s a matter of understanding risk, it’s a matter of gauging your opponents and it’s a matter of being held accountable. John McCain’s never done any of that in his official positions. I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands of millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee and he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, "I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it publicly?"

Apparently Wesley Clark had a senior moment—or was it battle fatigue?—and forgot that Obambi, whose resume is far thinner than McCain’s, is the opponent in question, not Wesley Clark. Schieffer, and America, called bullshit.

Howard Kurtz looks at the navel-gazing which accompanied Tim Russert’s passing. He takes a few hundred words to tell us journalists think journalists are Very Important People.

This caught my eye:

Leonard Downie’s announcement last week that he is stepping down as The Washington Post’s executive editor received zero attention on television, largely because he is not a news celebrity (and in fact avoids the limelight). But Downie, who took over The Post in 1991 -- the same year Russert became a Sunday morning host -- is arguably as important a media figure.

Every major story the paper broke, from secret CIA prisons to deplorable conditions at Walter Reed, from the Monica Lewinsky scandal to an intensive look at Dick Cheney’s influence, bore Downie’s imprint as a champion of investigative reporting. And, among other things, he was intimately involved in The Post’s coverage of the last seven presidential campaigns.

Matt Drudge broke the "Monica Lewinsky scandal" after Newsweek spiked it. I guess only MSM journalists can be gods. (And kissing up to the boss is universal, but kissing up to the departing boss is usually a waste of time.)

A military shooting demonstration in southeast France on Sunday left 16 people wounded, including children, when real bullets were used instead of blank ones, officials said.

Four of the wounded were in serious condition, including a 3-year-old child, Bernard Lemaire, chief of the regional administration in Aude, said on France-3 television. Fifteen of the injured were civilians.

A Defense Ministry official said the incident occurred during a demonstration of hostage-freeing techniques at the Laperrine military barracks. The official said investigators will look into why real bullets were used.

This is an improvement of sorts. Historically, a French soldier confronted by a dozen unarmed civilians would have surrendered.

San Francisco juvenile probation officials - citing the city’s immigrant sanctuary status - are protecting Honduran youths caught dealing crack cocaine from possible federal deportation and have given some offenders a city-paid flight home with carte blanche to return.

The city’s practices recently prompted a federal criminal investigation into whether San Francisco has been systematically circumventing U.S. immigration law, according to officials with knowledge of the matter.

City officials say they are trying to balance their obligations under federal and state law with local court orders and San Francisco’s policies aimed at protecting the rights of the young immigrants, who they say are often victims of exploitation.

Federal authorities counter that drug kingpins are indeed exploiting the immigrants, but that the city’s stance allows them to get away with "gaming the system."

San Francisco juvenile authorities have been grappling for several years with an influx of young Honduran immigrants dealing crack in the Mission District and Tenderloin.

It’s hard to tell where the drug rings end and the local government begins. Note: If there’s one group I wouldn’t want to "grapple" with, it’s San Francisco’s juvenile authorities. (Via Drudge.)

Lefty Peter Beinart looks at the state of American patriotism and finds it too reflexive on the right, and too lacking on the left:

On inspection, the liberal and conservative brands of patriotism both have defects. In a country where today’s nativists are yesterday’s immigrants and where change is practically a national religion, conservative patriotism can seem anachronistic. To be Spanish or Russian or Japanese is to imagine that you share a common ancestry and common traditions that trace back into the mists of time. But in America, where most people hail from somewhere else, that kind of blood-and-soil patriotism makes no sense. There is something vaguely farcical about conservative panic over Mexican flags in Los Angeles when Irish flags have long festooned Boston’s streets on St. Patrick’s Day. Linking patriotism too closely to a reverence for inherited tradition contradicts one of America’s most powerful traditions: that our future shouldn’t be dictated by our past.

By defining Americanism too narrowly and backwardly, conservative patriotism risks becoming clubby. And by celebrating America too unabashedly--without sufficient regard for America’s sins--it risks degenerating from patriotism into nationalism, a self-righteous, chest-thumping ideology that celebrates America at the expense of the rest of the world.

But if conservative patriotism can be too exclusionary, liberal patriotism risks not being exclusionary enough. If liberals love America purely because it embodies ideals like liberty, justice and equality, why shouldn’t they love Canada--which from a liberal perspective often goes further toward realizing those principles--even more? And what do liberals do when those universal ideals collide with America’s self-interest? Giving away the federal budget to Africa would probably increase the net sum of justice and equality on the planet, after all. But it would harm Americans and thus be unpatriotic.

As we’ve learned from decades of welfare spending, giving away the federal budget to Africa wouldn’t help anyone in the long run. Giving people wealth they haven’t earned may be a half-assed form of equality—an equality of outcomes, not opportunities—but it is by no means justice. Beinart goes even further astray here:

The American who volunteers to fight in Iraq and the American who protests the war both express a truer patriotism than the American who treats it as a distant spectacle with no claim on his talents or conscience.

Beinart contradicts his earlier thesis, perhaps unwittingly, in trying to make his secondary point about the patriotism of political engagement itself. It is conservative Americans who value "ideals like liberty, justice and equality" (and their expression through the rule of law, limited government, free markets, etc.) who seek to transform Iraq, because Iraqis are as entitled as Americans to those things, as are all those poor people in Africa, or any other group of humans. It is conservative Americans who are ultimately shown to be better stewards of American "ideals." It is conservatives who see nothing exceptional about Americans save our willingness to share the liberty we love with the rest of the world. (Via Hot Air.)

Saturday, 28 June 2008

A teenager was decapitated by a roller coaster after he hopped a pair of fences and entered a restricted area Saturday at Six Flags Over Georgia, authorities said.

Six Flags officials are uncertain why the unidentified 17-year-old from Columbia, S.C. scaled two six-foot fences and passed signs that said the restricted area was both off-limits and dangerous to visitors, spokeswoman Hela Sheth said in a news release.

Authorities were investigating reports from witnesses who said the teenager jumped the fences to retrieve a hat he lost while riding the Batman roller coaster, said Cobb County police Sgt. Dana Pierce. Three security guards were keeping visitors away from the ride on Saturday.